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82 Comments
- dtd00d, on 10/10/2007, -1/+391. Format HDD
2. Install OS
3. Stop downloading so much porn this time - evi1, on 10/10/2007, -0/+21How about just organize files by type and do not touch the My Documents folder? I have 2TB of data and have no problems finding stuff nor do i feel cluttered.
As long as you organize properly you do not need to delete anything... - TequilaCollins, on 10/10/2007, -2/+17Not worried. Unlike the closets on my home, when I run low on hard drive space, I just spend 25¢ to double it.
- dirtyfratboy, on 10/10/2007, -0/+152TB of "data." heh heh. i wish i had that much "data" too
im an ass - RobotBuddha, on 10/10/2007, -0/+14I totally disagree. I'd say purging is pointless, why reduce the amount of useful information you have available to you. Organize, tag everything. We have gigabytes worth of photos, somewhere around 500 burned dvds, and the pattern continues for most things. We don't have any trouble finding what we're looking for though, because we tag everything. It's all organized, and searchable in a database.
- DevinOlsen, on 10/10/2007, -0/+14This seems ridiculous to me... Though I may struggle finding a particular file at times, it all seems worth it for me... I can't tell you how 'fun' it is to look back on old 'projects' 'movies' and 'pictures'... So thanks, but no thanks..
- Bawk, on 10/10/2007, -0/+14So digital bulimia?
- justananomaly, on 10/10/2007, -0/+12#1.) Erase all your LOLCat jpg/gif/jpg's
... what? That's it. You're done. - ToxicBomber, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7I have a friend who at one time in his life ( before I basically beat some sense into him...lol) would save literally almost every file he downloaded (legal or quasi-legal...*ahem*) to his DESKTOP! There were no separate drives, partitions, folders, sub-directories...nada. He just "right-click-save" to his desktop. He would have so many files and icons on there that he would have to delete a few things every other day, in order to find ones that had gone off the screen! It was an absolute mess....
Thankfully though now he has multiple drives and sub-directories....(porn1, porn2, porn3, etc.) - DDDavinnn, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7I just bookmarked this website... sigh.
- PATSCRU, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6I always think about that, but then i wonder what would happen if i needed some porn at some point and i wasn't near an internet connection, say on a desert island.....that's when those Tera Patrick .avi's will prove to be verrrry useful.
- hadak, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6Hi, my name is Hans, and...I'm a packrat.
- thinkingserious, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5The main gist is to purge, purge and then purge some more. This article has good suggestions on how to do so.
- DontSayFanboy, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5Each icon represents a hit to the filesystem to get the file's attributes, memory to cache the results and then a structure in the window server that must be stored and redrawn over and over. An excessive number of icons on the desktop WILL result in poorer performance.
Or to put it another way "Excessive desktop icons and desktop wallpaper take up their share of system memory and CPU usage. Keep them to a minimum or avoid them altogether."
Don't take it from me, take it from microsoft:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/835606/en-gb
Or this article for the Mac, where the author quantifies his claims with Quartz Debug:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20051117154624368&lsrc=osxh
Or this article for Mac OS 9, detailing how to 'rebuild your desktop'
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=10182 - tdp301, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4It asks if I have 20 or more folders in My Documents, I checked and I have more than 3,000 folders. Is that bad?
- chrisbarr, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4article summery: "delete files you don't need"
- gfixler, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4Here here. It's not the quantity of data, but how you organize it. I have just shy of 29k photos and movies (61+GB) I've taken with a couple of cameras over the past several years. I don't tag them, because frankly, I just take way too many photos for that, but I do have an idea for how I could go about it, which I'll get back to in a moment, but first, I'd like to mention how I organize my pics, because it works really well for me, and it could help others. I find few people have nearly as many photos as me, unless they're photographers, or deeply nostalgic, or stalkers. Here's a peek at my top-level directory structures:
img
- home
- imagesS230
- imagesSD500
- misc
- projects
- scanned
- toShow
Home probably doesn't belong in there - they're pics from my family, usually emailed to me, or sent on discs, but I didn't create them, so they're the odd duck in this set. The two images* folders are my 2 Canon Elph cameras, the SD being the upgrade a few years back. Misc is currently images I'm bringing back from college, and even high school, from old backup discs. They're doing nothing but rotting there, and I have the ability to organize now, so I want to pull all data BACK IN, rather than purge, as the article suggests.
Projects is full of non-photo-based imagery projects, like blueprints I've drawn up for things I'm building, or photo manipulations/projects - "Photoshops." Scanned is slowly filling up with some of the 13 2" binders of photos and slides from my college photos classes, as well as things like scans of documents I want to shred, but want some copy of, or of scans of old photos. These are easy to sort through with a naming convention I'll mention in a moment.
The toShow folder is the messiest at the moment, as it's years of the tiny for-the-web images I've uploaded to my site, or other places online over the past 5 or so years. This is a nearly folderless vat of anything and everything.
The two images* folders are the big ones, though. SD500 is the newer, and S230 is laid out the same, so I'll just go into the SD500 one. This folder, like the other, has 7 subfolders:
events - of a party with friends, pics at a dinner with visiting family, at the premiere of something...
games - I'm a nerd - I've ended up with a handful of pics of game endings, or movies of me playing :)
home - pics I've taken while vising home, always at the holidays anymore
loner - pics of myself, things on my desk, stuff around my house - loner stuff
projects - I often make things, and document the process - all of that stuff is in here
traffic - pics of cool things on trucks near me in traffic jams, funny things I've spottted at red lights, etc.
work - pics of coworkers, work events, things at lunches out with coworkers - anything 'at work'
Already that splits things up very well, as I always remember in which category what I'm looking for falls - who wouldn't? A pic of a coworker is in 'work.' If it's of anything back home, it's in 'home.' Inside each of those are year folders, like 2002, and 2007. Inside those are the set folders. I only added the years recently when some categories, mostly 'work' and 'loner' (*weep*) got too long. I like the extra categorization, though. I mostly always remember if something happened last year, or the year before.
The folders inside them all follow the same format: YY-MM-DD_briefDescriptionOfSet
Here are a few in /img/imagesSD500/events/2007/:
07-07-02_Kwik-E-Mart!
07-05-19_MakerFaire2007_day001
07-04-15_GrandSlamSciFiConvention
I keep all of these year folders sorted in reverse by name, so they stack up with the newest things at the top, even if I've created them out of order. There are 25 events folders from 2006, and 21 currently '07. This isn't much to sift through, and the names are always concise, and easy to visually parse, so it only takes about 15 seconds to find what I want from a cold start.
In the rare event that I can't - it's happened a few times - I hop into a shell. I should note at this point that I'm on Linux. I should also note that I've just passed the 1 year mark on Ubuntu - my first Linux distro, and many of the problems mentioned in the article don't happen here. The system doesn't bog down, or lag. It runs 100% the same as it did 1 year ago, and remember that I've been a n3wb for much of that, clomping about, messing things up. It's just solid, and with the ext3 file system (somewhat default/standard), files don't fragment, as the system always keeps files spread apart, instead of stacked up. I've filled the disc up several times, and backed it off again, and I have yet to see it spend more than a few seconds very occasionally swapping. It's a pretty tight file system, and just a solid rig all around. There's no "it's been a long time, I'd better reinstall to clear things up" on this box, which rules.
Anyway, in a shell, I can search in many ways. I've made a point of getting familiar with the shell, which has turned into a love of the shell, because I can ask so many weird questions of my own files, and manipulate everything so well. This is one way to ask the img directory for the path to any of my Comic-Con folders:
img$ find -type d -iname "*comic*"
img$ is just the prompt showing me which directory I'm in. The find command uses -type d (directory), and -iname (the i is for 'ignore case'), and seeks here anything with "comic" somewhere in it. That gives this:
./scanned/06-06-06_Comic-ConFaxedTicketRequestForm
./imagesS230/events/2003/03-07-19_ComicCon
./imagesS230/events/2003/03-07-17_ComicCon
./imagesS230/events/2005/05-07-16_ComicCon2005Day2
./imagesS230/events/2005/05-07-15_ComicCon2005Day1
I don't know why I have that ticket request form from Devil's Day - I probably should purge that one - but the rest are the folders of the 2 times I've been to that event. I occasionally find discrepancies like this in how I've named things, too, and fix them, so for clarity, and uniformity. I'll probably rename these 4 to follow the ComicCon_day001 format - one I use fairly universally elsewhere. When you structure like that, and try encourage conformity in naming, you create a system that's open to your crazy imaginings. Maybe one day I'm just curious as to all my "first days" of anything. I can scan for _day001 in the entire set. I just did, and found 2 folders. Trying _01, I found an additional 5. One more hidden under _day1. I will now bring them all up to the 001 standard (the safer, as it can contain more variants). I make little tweaks like that whenever I see an inconsistency, and over time, the system gets stronger, and more uniquely searchable.
You could simply use search/find in any other OS, too, including in the folder views in Linux, but the shell just lets me fire off way more operations in the same amount of time, without all the wiggling around of the mouse. And these are again, the edge cases, as usually I can path right to what I need in seconds, because I've invested energy and interest in keeping myself organized as I go. I use the SD500 folder these days for just dumping in all the pics on the camera, and sort them when I feel like it. Right now there are 35 pics that are sitting in there unsorted, but they're in only about 4 or 5 groupings I can squirrel away quickly enough. In fact, I'll do it now.
Additionally, if I took movies at an event, I make a 'movies' folder (even if there's only 1) inside that dated folder, and put them in there, to keep them from showing up in thumbnail views in the browser, or screwing with photo viewers. This also lets me scan directories named 'movies' to see how many there are, or get lists of which dated folders contain movies, and any other nerdy pushings about of data I ever care to view.
I've been toying with ideas for simplifying things even more. I might mock up a little UI to learn how to write apps for GNOME (the desktop environment on Ubuntu). Then I could just right-click on the unsorted photos in the Nautilus file browser, pop up that UI, click a radio button for type (e.g. 'loner'), and type in the short description, and let it create the folder, and move the images in there for me, auto-dating them, with a checkbox for rolling it back to the previous day, as I like to keep the dates consistent with the day I lived through, rather than the file, or EXIF data, which after midnight thinks it's the next day.
I'm organized pretty much everywhere now, and it feels great - way better than giving up, and trashing any of my nostalgia. As for bookmarks, I'm considering making an open-source version of PowerMarks. I had over 3k bookmarks on that, synced up between work, and home, and could find anything I could remember in any way in literally 2 seconds. That's the power of proper tagging. It also lead to some great emergent groupings. - chrisbarr, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4Where can i get a 500GB drive for 25¢ ?
- ChromaVita, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3That, sir, is a waste of 20 gigs.
- jfoust2, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3The oldest file on my PC dates to 1982. I've been copying and installing over the top ever since then, so there's still DOS and Win 3.11 on my system somewhere. I'm still sad about the files I had before that - lost, stolen, erased. I still have a few backups on paper tape and 9-track. Tubs and tubs of 8mm, Iomega, DAT, DLT, and Amiga floppies. The good stuff has been duped and migrated to newer media. Uphill, both ways at 300 baud, you whippersnappers!
- snowball69, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Corrolary: The day after you delete what you *think* you don't "need" it then becomes and urgent and essential requirement
"Parkinson's Law — Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Coined by C. Northcote Parkinson.
* Many corollaries have been stated. One is the Technician's Corollary — No matter how big the data storage medium, it will soon be filled."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adages_named_after_people - elsagacious, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2I bookmarked it, and also copied and pasted it into a word document that I saved on my hard drive.
- snowball69, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Bah! (claps one hand)
- AnonymousCow, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3No resources are used in loading/drawing all those icons?
- snowball69, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. ..... Stop trying to control everything and just let go" - (Tyler Durden)
Dugg up for Zen content :) - jerbaker, on 10/10/2007, -4/+6FTFA: "I deleted or sorted through all of those, and now my desktop is nice a clear. Simple, calming, and it makes your computer run faster."
Any person who has a clue how computers work does not honestly believe that cleaning up your desktop will speed up your computer. Where did they find this guy and why do they think he knows something about computers? - cyroxos, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2I try to collect and archive everything. I mean, my god they have 1Tb consumer hard drives out there, why not keep chatlogs, emails, bookamrks, pictures, etc. Music, video and other media can be archived in to neat folders, and when you need space, buy another HDD, or burn to a DVD, or get rid of unwanted media.
but as far as personal items, i try and back that up often and keep it. i mean... who doesn't want to remember the first picture they masturbated to? - oriondarkwood, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Here is my stats (this is just HD space not including DVD/CD)
31 gig - mp3
15 gig - digital pictures porn and otherwise
55 gig - games
30 gig - movies porn and otherwise
54 gig - text, pdf, txt, cbr etc..
35 gig - Emulators and roms
I have over 1600 bookmarks, 600 torrert links waiting for download, 450 emule links waiting for download, 50 DVD's, 120 CD's - effedup, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2As soon as someone goes on a mass deleting spree I get a phone call saying they need help reinstalling their OS.
- Quakes, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Uhhh... The Knowledge Base article you linked to is for WINDOWS 98. You know, the time when computers were a hundred times slower than todays computers. When cleaning your desktop had an actual performance boost.
- Larke2000, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2made a bookmark for later. saved a copy to the hard drive in case the server is down in a month or two when i get around to it. probably put that on a thumb drive in case my hard drive crashes. i mean... you never know. right?
- inactive, on 01/03/2009, -0/+1Wait.. Is this person really suggesting we delete projects over 2 years old? That's the worst recommendation I've heard in a while.
- snowball69, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I’d caution against using thumb drives. I’ve managed to go through two thumb drives and 3 equivalent MMC storage cards in 2 years. I’ve found them to be *extremely* unreliable and deficient as a secure means of storage.
Nor is this just my own experience. Searching the net I found plenty of people with the same problems.
If you do decide to use them then use a “belt and braces” approach and image them regularly onto cheap DVDs or CDs.
Redundancy and multiple copies across different drives is also good data-security policy. What you have to counter here against anti-packratism is the price you put on that corrupted datafile. For many the cost of losing it could be quite high. - aseidl, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Only 20gb? My image directory was about 200gb (same as you, no porn).
That's what happens when you find 1m resolution aerial photography of the whole state. - snowball69, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Dugg up for being honest about the porn ;)
- jerbaker, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Um, not when it isn't being displayed. How often do you sit around staring at your desktop wishing it would sit there displaying faster?
- JohnnyXmas, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Fry's sells 500GB drives for $150 all the time. Go buy a few, and install Google Desktop.
Done.
PS: Don't forget the RAID 1! - snowball69, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1PMSL - how true that is!!! If I had a dollar for every time a person did that I'd have about... errr.. $20 :)
- elementop, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1*ADDABLE* on Linux? Ever heard of "locate" and updatedb? It comes packaged with every Linux distribution I've ever used.
- snowball69, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Tip: Don't let other people define your lifestyle for you!
- slapthemonkey, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1well 1Tb of this and that stuff and i don't think i would like to purge........
- JonLatane, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Or you could keep stuff properly filed away in your Documents, Music, Video, Picture, etc. folders. I never got why Microsoft had pictures, video, music etc. in the "My Documents" folder when the files are CLEARLY not documents. I'm glad they fixed the behavior in Vista (and even re-organized my old My Documents folder when I copied it from backup) to be more rational and catch up with OS X and Linux. Probably the single biggest upgrade for me when I switched.
- maz2331, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I have about 20 GB of images too. High resolution scans of 35mm film saved in TIFF format takes up a lot of space.
- vrillusions, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2I LOL'd everytime he said "purge" especially the "Create a purge schedule". Promoting digital anorexia?
- snowball69, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Yes. You should go to bed with NO SUPPER!
- slapthemonkey, on 10/10/2007, -0/+145?........thats.....remarkable
- Cellulose, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Ok, sounds like the author had a massive hard drive failure and forgot to back up his files... and so now, he's trying to rationalize why it was ok to lose all of his data.
The real solution to digital packrats is to give up on "organization" and just use a Desktop Search tool (Windows, Google, Yahoo, Copernic, Spotlight, etc). Quite frankly, it's faster to find something using one of those tools than it is to navigate through just two folders... and will probably find the document faster than you can remember where you put it.
Besides, real packrats never let their HD get more than 75% full because "they might need the extra space"... They *replace* their hard drives with exponentially larger drives when they reach 50% full and at some point have very large RAID 5 NAS attached to their networks... - snowball69, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Syrup of figs works wonderfully - you might pull a bit of a face though when it finally does it's stuff!
- snowball69, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Depends on what your definition of porn is doesn't it?. Mine is full of hot, steamy, crazy, loco porn ...
http://christopher8062.fotopic.net/p7600877.html (look at the cylinders on that - phwoarrrrr!! - yes yes yes) :P - snowball69, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Wow!. My hero!. It took me a long time and a lot of lost files, program code and headaches to realise the value of backups and data redundancy.
Whilst you may not *frequently* access such files this really isn't the issue. The data is there *if* and when you need it and the cost of storing it, esp. on DVDs is ridiculously cheap. I've found useful files occasionally from backups going back to around 1990 and still have old "C" code from around 1992 and a few DOS utilities which come in handy now and then.
Thank goodness crappy and unreliable tape backups can now be replaced by stupidly cheap mirrored external hard drives. Despite the inherent unreliability, I've found hard drives to be the most reliable media over the longest period of time (if stored carefully). -
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